A mobile network operator may provide its customers with access to data over a mobile network via radio access points. Some customers may purchase unlimited data plans and may use a lot of data, providing bottlenecks at the radio access points and reducing the quality of the experience of other customers. To discourage such high data use, the mobile network operator may throttle the data access of some customers, reducing their data speed. This may discourage customers from accessing a large amount of data.
However, one problem with the above scheme is that, when the customer's data speed is reduced, the customer has to spend more time to access the same amount of data (e.g., if the data speed is halved, the customer has to spend twice as much time). As a result, resources at the radio access point have to be provided to the customer for a longer time, and more power from the battery of the customer's computing device may be consumed. As the foregoing illustrates, a new approach for data throttling may be desirable.